Arrogant Years

Product Description

In the award-winning The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit" Lucette Lagnado offered a heartbreaking portrait of her father Leon a successful Cairo boulevardier forced to take flight with his family during the rise of the Nasser dictatorship & of her familys struggle to rebuild a new life in a new l&. " The Arrogant Years" continues Lagnados saga telling the story of her mother Edith coming of age in a magical old Cairo of dusty alleyways & grand villas inhabited by pashas & their wives. Lagnado then revisits her own early years in America-first as a schoolgirl in Brooklyns immigrant enclaves where she dreams of becoming the fearless Mrs. Emma Peel of " The Avengers" & later as an avenging reporter for some of her adopted countrys most prestigious newspapers. A stranger growing up in a strange land Lagnado reveals how her adolescence was further complicated by cancer at sixteen. The devastating consequences would rob her of her "arrogant years"
- the period defined by an overwhelming sense of possibility invincibility & confidence. Lagnado looks to the women sequestered behind the wooden screen at her childhood synagogue to the young coeds at Vassar & Columbia in the 1970s to her own mother & the women of their past in Cairo & reflects on their stories as she struggles to make sense of her own choices."